This blog will follow my trials and tribulations playing live mid stakes Texas Hold'Em throughout California.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

How About a Sit 'n Go

So I'm sitting here at Commerce thinking maybe I should write about how bad everyone is. Then I realized people are doing absurd shit faster than I can type. Someone has called 3 cold THREE hands in a row. IMR, come on here, I can't be expected to catalogue that depth and breadth of talent.

So Hawaiian Gardens runs Sit n Gos on a daily basis. They have 3 formats, standard, triple up, and double up. I was up 15 bets or so and feeling like ass, but as usual it was 5:30pm in LA county, so I might as well have been in Tiajuana; going home was simply not an option. So I bought into the last double up SNG of the day. The format is pretty simply; ten players pony up $110, and the last 5 receive $200. The chip leader also gets a buyin into some silly tournament, but that might actually have negative value for me as I'd waste my time in it instead of playing 20-40. Most people don't know this but I've played a ton of SNGs online and have like 4 figures of posts in the STT forum on 2p2, so I figured to have at least an edge over the field. Also 10% rake is actually not awful for these, so I probably should be profitable.

We started with 800 chips and blinds of 25/25, with 12 minute levels. Calling such a structure "turbo" would be extremely generous. The speed of play wasn't excruciatingly slow, but it was close, and we were lucky to deal 10 hands per level. I made the first kill when a player mis-fired a single 100 unit chip in an attempt to raise (1 chip is a call in NL) and I raised anyway, hoping he'd think I didn't see his mistake and reraise (since I had aces). He just called and immediately declared all-in on a Jack-High flop. The player in the middle folded and I snap-called to bust his AJ.

At this point I've realized that I don't remember much else. I busted the next guy also then just kind of threw my weight around to steal the blinds a few times. Some idiot called a SB open shove with A6 and managed to crack KK, and eventually the button was all in for 1.75 big blinds and I called with the 73o to try and end it. Of course his Jack high held up UI and we played on. Eventually a player was down to a single 25 unit chip. He tripled up, then inexplicably folded his UTG hand. Someone limped in which is either a brain fart or AA since it was my big blind and I had everyone covered by like 1200 or more, but I opted not to shove my 76o cause I mean it didn't matter I was cashing and even had a lock on the chip lead. So next hand 3 of us are in against 75 chip dude and the guy who beat my 73o bets 400 into a 700 pot on the turn. This is INSANE until you realize he was 700 chips behind me for 1st. He bet the river and somehow got paid off, knocked out 75 chip guy, and collected the tourney entry, which as I said was maybe less than worthless to me so no biggie. The next day during the tournament I dropped $1500 in the 20, so perhaps I was wrong about that but whatever.

Final opionion is that if they doubled the buy-in to maybe $215 it would actually be worthwhile, or at least close, for me to play the events once in a while. On average they take less than an hour and an ROI of 10% should be a piece of cake. But at $110 it's not very close.